Politics

by hilzoy

Over the weekend, I noticed that the conservative blogs were up in arms about Obama’s statement that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Having seen the actual video, I thought this was pretty silly. But now that John McCain has started misrepresenting what Obama actually said, I thought it might be a good idea to get clear about this.

Regrettably, ABC News does not let me embed their video, or even copy the relevant parts of their transcript. The video of Obama’s entire conversation, along with the transcript, is here. I urge anyone who is bothered by what Obama said to go watch or read it. Here’s the gist:

Joe the plumber asks: wouldn’t I, a guy who is thinking of buying a business with a little over $250,000 in revenue, pay more under Obama’s plan? After Obama explains what his plan does, Joe says: look, I have worked hard, and I’m just getting taxed more and more. Obama replies: well, there are two ways of looking at it. One is that you’ve worked hard, you’re successful, and now you’re being penalized for your success. But here’s another: you were probably working just as hard earlier, when you were starting out. And under my plan, you would have gotten more money then, and so you would have been able to save more, and you would have gotten to where you are today more quickly.

Obama then points out that taxes have been cut a lot for people who are doing well, but that ordinary folks are not doing nearly so well — in fact, their average income has gone down over the last eight years. And (after a bit about the flat tax) he says:

“For folks like me who have worked hard, but frankly also been lucky, I don’t mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress that I just met over there who’s — things are slow and she can barely make the rent.

My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re going to be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody, and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

This is what John McCain was referring to last night when he said:

“You know, when Sen. Obama ended up his conversation with Joe the plumber — we need to spread the wealth around. In other words, we’re going to take Joe’s money, give it to Sen. Obama, and let him spread the wealth around.

I want Joe the plumber to spread that wealth around. You told him you wanted to spread the wealth around.”

But that’s just not what Obama said. He did not say that he wanted to spread Joe’s wealth around. He certainly did not say that he thought he was entitled to simply expropriate Joe’s wealth and distribute it to poor people, like Robin Hood. He said he wanted to spread the wealth: i.e., to have a tax code that is less skewed towards the wealthy. That’s Obama’s radical idea: progressive taxation.

Hand me my smelling salts!

If any change in people’s proportionate tax burdens counts as expropriating the money of those who end up paying a greater share and giving it to those who pay a lower one, then any President who has ever enacted changes in the tax code has expropriated people’s wealth. George Bush, for instance: in 2004, his tax cuts gave a 2.3% increase in after-tax income to the middle 20%, but a 6.3% increase to millionaires. This shift of tax burdens from the rich to the poor is obviously just an attempt to take poor people’s money and “spread” it to rich people.* And Ronald Reagan: he raised payroll taxes while cutting the top marginal rates: more expropriation!

Moreover, Reagan signed the 1986 tax reform bill into law: that bill eliminated a lot of corporate tax loopholes that had allowed some major corporations to pay “little or nothing in income taxes”. In other words, these corporations’ share of taxes went from zero (or near zero) to the same rate as other corporations, for no better reason than some misguided notion of “fairness.” Socialist expropriation!

And don’t even get me started on the monstrous socialist transfer of wealth that increases in the child tax credit or education credits involve. Socialist, the lot of them.

Changing the tax code in such a way that the proportional burdens of different groups of people also change is not socialism. It’s just a change in tax policy.

Read more

by publius

Mark Twain:

The harder I work, the luckier I get.

If Obama ultimately wins, I expect to hear complaints that he simply got lucky that the markets crashed. Indeed, via Fallows, I see that Steve Schmidt is already saying as much.

It’s true, Obama has gotten lucky in some respects. But he’s also made his own luck. Focusing on “luck” obscures just how strong his campaign has been. The Obama team’s long-term strategy and disciplined tactics put it in a position to reap the benefits of positive developments. Similarly, the McCain camp’s lack of strategy and discipline left it vulnerable to these same developments.

It didn’t have to be this way though. The market crash would of course been hard for any Republican. But McCain is arguably the one Republican who could have potentially weathered it — assuming the campaign had been run differently.

Let’s imagine a different world. Let’s imagine that, in the spring of 2008, McCain wraps up the nomination and charges headfirst to the center. From March to October, he preaches two themes: (1) I’m a reformer who bucks the GOP; and (2) Obama’s not ready. No stupid gimmicks. No Britney ads. From Day 1, he’s pursuing a simple, disciplined strategy of distancing himself from the GOP, keeping his favorability ratings high with independents and conservative Democrats (and the press), and challenging Obama in a tough but substantive way.

These are the themes that McCain’s campaign should have been built around — the themes of his underrated convention speech (in fact, Nate Silver has speculated his bump came from that speech rather Palin’s partisan one). In this imaginary world, McCain could have distanced himself from Bush and from the GOP — much the same way that Bush did in 2000.

It’s not that hard. In a year where being Republican is toxic, don’t run as one. Run as an above-the-fray bipartisan. If he had, he would have been in a position to escape the anger directed at the White House because he would have been disassociated from it. Instead, McCain just assumed everyone thought he was independent because of a campaign many young voters don’t even remember that well.

Yes, the base would have been a problem in this world. But the Palin pick shows that they’re pretty cheap dates. Someone like Huckabee could have solidified the base, while simultaneously reinforcing the “different kind of Republican message.”

Also too (my new favorite phrase), McCain could have distanced himself in a diplomatic way. He could have distanced himself not by attacking the GOP, but by casting himself as a “fundamentalist” in the truest sense of the word. He would have been John the Baptist — the voice in the wilderness. My friends, the Washington GOP has gone astray and we need to get back to the fundamentals that Reagan taught us. Or something like that — not a repudiation, but a restoration of the lost golden age, which is a message many conservatives would find appealing.

But that’s not at all what happened.

Read more

by hilzoy

TPM has a post about Fox’s recent documentary about Obama. I was dimly aware of it, but I didn’t know that when Andy Martin appeared on Fox, he claimed that Obama “had once trained to overthrow the [US] government.” I went and looked up the transcript on Lexis/Nexis, and post the relevant parts below. But first, a bit of background on Andy Martin:

“A quick word about Andy Martin. During a 1983 bankruptcy case he referred to a federal judge as a “crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.” Martin, who in the past was known as Anthony Martin-Trigona, is one of the most notorious litigants in the history of the United States. He’s filed hundreds, possibly thousands, of lawsuits, often directed at judges who have ruled against him, or media outlets that cover him unfavorably. A 1993 opinion by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Atlanta, described these lawsuits as “a cruel and effective weapon against his enemies,” and called Martin a “notoriously vexatious and vindictive litigator who has long abused the American legal system.” He once even attempted to intervene in the divorce proceedings of a judge who’d ruled against him, petitioning the state court to be appointed as the guardian of the judge’s children.”

That’s Chris Hayes, from the Nation. You can see some of the rulings in a few of Martin’s court cases here (check out footnotes 3 and 4) and here. The last contains one of Martin’s complaints, which I excerpt below the fold, so that you can see who we’re dealing with.

Now for the transcript. It’s from Hannity’s America, ‘Obama And Friends: A History Of Radicalism’, aired on Oct. 5. (Video here.)

“HANNITY: In 1985, fresh from Columbia University Obama returned to Chicago to become just that, a community organizer, a job he says qualifies him in part to hold a nation’s highest office. What exactly is a community organizer? After all, he didn’t know what it was when he started as one.

ANDY MARTIN, AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST: I think a community organizer in Barack Obama’s case was somebody that was in training for a radical overthrow of the government. You have to really stretch to believe his story that he was living in New York City. He was earning 50,000 to 60,000 a year. And he left this to come to Chicago, to a city where he knew no one, to suddenly start, quote, “organizing,” unquote, people.

In my opinion, Barack Obama had already been influenced by his radical ideology and philosophy, probably had met William Ayers in New York and was coming here to lay the foundations for what he thought would be some sort of a political movement that he would be a part of.

My view is that the community organizing was actually kind of sham event that really Bill Ayers was testing him. Because the way these radicals work, they don’t give you a big project until you pass muster with a small project. And so they sent him out to Chicago to see what he would do. He passed the test.

OBAMA: And I decided to become a community organizer. I organized black folks at the grassroots. It was in these neighborhoods I received the best education that I ever had.

MARTIN: He had virtually no impact in his so-called community organizing career except to lay the foundation for his future radical associations. It was then also I believe that he was exposed perhaps by Louis Farrakhan to Kahlid al-Mansour. Because while he was a community organizer that Khalid al-Mansour starts raising money to promote Obama to Harvard Law School.

So obviously, in Ayers’ mind and al-Mansour’s mind, Obama had proven his reliability. He was somebody that could be trusted to do what he was told. And all of a sudden, they now are going to take him to the next level. All that comes out of the years in Chicago. Obama wasn’t organizing a community. He was organizing his career and organizing his life’s step to the next level. That’s all he did in Chicago.”

I see. Obama “probably” met William Ayers in New York, and followed him to Chicago, where he could be groomed for higher things, and subjected to “tests”. That makes perfect sense. Also, someone with an Arab name starts “raising money to promote Obama to Harvard Law School”, apparently under the misapprehension that you can buy your way in. It’s all a very clever ploy, because somehow — via communications from the spirit plane? a Ouija board? — Ayers et at knew that Obama would end up running for high office, and winning.

Right.

Sometimes people describe Fox News as a sort of antidote to more liberal news stations. That’s not true. When CNN airs a “documentary” that presents, unchallenged, claims that John McCain is running a child porn ring from one of his seven houses, we can talk about equivalence. Until then, we have several news networks, but Fox is not among them.

As noted above, I put excerpts from some of Martin’s filings below the fold. I thought it might be a good idea to provide some context that would allow you to assess his credibility. If crazed and ugly anti-Semitic ravings upset you, do not read them.

Read more